Two Weeks In - What Empty Time Defaults To

I deliberately built no structure into these first weeks. I wanted to decompress, not swap one diary for another. What I hadn't reckoned on was where empty time actually goes when you don't fill it, which turns out to be straight into my phone.

July 2026 : 4 min read - Part of the My Personal Journey to Early Retirement series at FreeBefore65.

We went to York last week. My wife had a day away from work and we spent it at the art gallery, wandering, not really talking about retirement or money or any of it. Just looking at pictures and arguing gently about which ones we liked. It was a good day, and I'd like more of them, though for now they depend on her diary more than mine. I'm the one with the free time and I'm still waiting for a gap in someone else's calendar. A strange adjustment in itself.

Two weeks into not working, and the blog's gone quiet because I don't have much to report yet. The pre-retirement material came easily, because I'd been turning it over for months. Actual retirement is a fortnight old, and so far it's felt less like retirement and more like a staycation, or that odd stretch on furlough during Covid when the days had no shape and nobody was sure what to do with them. There isn't much life in it yet, or at least not the kind I thought I'd be writing about.

What there is comes down to this. I chose not to build any structure into these first weeks, on purpose, wanting to come down from it all properly rather than just replace one diary with another. It turns out unstructured time doesn't default to guitar practice or reading or long walks. It defaults to whatever's easiest to reach, and that's my phone. I do the daily NYT games, the LinkedIn ones (and check if I've beaten my contacts), the MinuteCryptic clue, and somewhere in there I end up three replies deep in a political argument with a stranger, irritated about something that won't matter by teatime.

The weights in the morning help. Guitar most days helps. Neither stops the feed calling later on, and I don't think that's a coincidence. Weights and guitar have a natural stopping point, twenty minutes and you're done, whereas the feed has no edge to it at all. You just keep going until something else interrupts you.

I've at least worked out roughly what the phone is standing in for. Part of it is just wanting contact with people, which thirty-odd years of working in one form or another trains into you more than you notice at the time. There's also the small satisfaction of putting someone right when they're arguing from opinion rather than fact, which was a real part of the old job and doesn't switch off just because the job has. And underneath both, I think, is missing the feeling of being someone whose view carried weight in a room. None of that justifies spending a few hours a day irritated by strangers, but at least I know what I'm chasing now.

It had got more intrusive than I was comfortable with, and that felt like fair warning rather than something to shrug off. I still don't want proper structure back in these weeks. I'll try to point the energy somewhere else instead. Whether that actually happens is another matter. I've said things like this to myself before and been back on the same threads within a day.